Gun rapid-fire devices in the crosshairs

By Dan Freedman :
January 30, 2013
: Updated: January 31, 2013 3:38pm

A man tries out the Slide Fire system at the SHOT Show in 2012. The flexible bridge between stock and mainframe works to keep it firing round after round.

Photo By Joy Lewis/Joy Lewis/Abilene Reporter-News

Slide Fire Solutions Inc., headquarters is located in Moran, Texas. The company designs and develops bump fire stock that fits to semi-automatic rifles including the AR15 and AK47. Chief Executive Manager Laura Shackelford said the design of the product allows for a person to have more control over shooting a firearm. "We can't say what lawmakers will do, we feel like our product is a safe way to bump fire," Shackelford said. Joy Lewis/Abilene Reporter-News

Photo By Joy Lewis/Joy Lewis/Abilene Reporter-News

Slide Fire Solutions, a company started by a disabled veteran, is headquartered in Moran, Texas. Jeremiah Cottle, owner of Slide Fire Solutions inc., designed a bump fire stock to attach onto semi-automatic rifles. Joy Lewis/Abilene Reporter-News

“Fully automatic weapons are illegal, and I strongly believe that devices allowing shooters to fire at similar rates should also be outlawed,” Feinstein said in a statement.

For Steve Sposato of Lafayette, Calif., such devices are a nightmare that did, in fact, happen.

Gian Luigi Ferri used an earlier incarnation of bumpfire, the Hellfire trigger, on the Tec-9 semiautomatic pistols he fired during a July 1, 1993, shooting rampage in San Francisco. Among the eight people murdered that day was Sposato's wife, Jody Jones-Sposato.

“These devices have no purpose at all in our society, period, end of story,” Sposato said. “People think it's fun, but people think it's fun to throw grenades, and they're illegal.”

Sposato called manufacturers of these products “dirtbags out to make a buck, and they don't care who gets hurt.”

Gun enthusiasts offer rave reviews but warn bumpfire can be an expensive habit.

“Fun? Yes indeed, the Slide Fire Stock is überfun,” David Fortier wrote in Shotgun News last September. “It will put a smile on your face just as quick as it empties your wallet as you burn through copious amounts of ammunition.”

David Koresh, the Branch Davidian cult leader in Waco, told law enforcement authorities he used Hellfire triggers on semi-automatic weapons, according to “No More Wacos,” a 1995 book by gun-rights advocate David Kopel.

Koresh and his followers killed four ATF agents during a 1993 raid before setting their compound ablaze during a subsequent FBI assault. At least 74 people, including 25 children, died.

Gun manufacturers and users alike long have been fascinated with machine guns, which turned warfare on its head when used to devastating effect in World War I.

Prohibition-era gangsters' use of the “Tommy gun,” which shot 875 rounds a minute or more, prompted Congress in 1934 to pass the National Firearms Act placing stiff federal registration and taxation requirements on machine gun possession.

Although the technology has been around 40 years or more, bumpfire devices gained popularity in the wake of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which among other things outlawed civilian possession or transfer of machine guns not legally in circulation prior to the law's signing date, May 19, 1986.

Since then, firearms entrepreneurs have played a cat-and-mouse game with ATF regulators, attempting to engineer devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to replicate fully automatic ones while staying inside the legal distinction that divides them: A single trigger pull for each shot (semiautomatic) vs. a continuous burst of shots “without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger” (machine gun).

Although not required to do so under law, the ATF's Firearms Technology Branch reviews any submitted device and determines what side of the line it's on.

“We don't take a position on whether we like an item or don't like an item,” ATF senior firearms enforcement officer Max Kingery said. “We simply classify it according to the law.”

A Marine Corps veteran, Kingery test-fires guns with each device installed. For the device makers, his decision can make the difference between commercial success and failure.

ATF officials weren't able to provide exact numbers on how many devices have been submitted for classification. Kingery said that in seven years, he's reviewed 10 to 12 such items.

Traditional bumpfire devices required a rifle be held at waist level, making the weapon difficult to shoot accurately, if the shooter could get it to work at all, Internet reviewers say.

By contrast, Slidefire Solutions' Slide Stock is held at shoulder level.

Its flexible bridge between stock and mainframe essentially harnesses the weapon's recoil power to keep it firing round after round.

Instead of pulling the trigger for each shot, shooters pull back with their trigger finger and forward with their free hand. If done with the proper push-and-pull, the weapon convulses into a paroxysm of fire.

Kingery compared it to stretching a rubber band.

To some, distinctions between fully automatic machine guns and bumpfire-equipped semiautomatics may seem metaphysical at best.

In online videos, including a promotional one on Slidefire Solutions' own website, gun frames gyrate back and forth against the Slide Stock as users fire continuous bursts with little or no effort beyond a single trigger pull.

But Kingery insisted the appearances are deceiving.

“It's not just one motion,” he said. “It might appear to be shooting automatically, but it's actually not.”

Slidefire Solutions put ATF's 2010 approval letter on its website.

Online reviewers routinely urge buyers to print out this and other such letters and show them to police who question their weapons' legality.

Slidefire Solutions didn't respond to requests for comment.

All such devices, whatever their properties, are illegal in California. They also are illegal in New York, but comment threads on several New York state gun-enthusiast websites refer to seeing the devices for sale in New York gun shops, and at gun shows in the state. Other posters referred to ordering them successfully from companies selling online.

Questions of public safety are “always a concern of any law enforcement agency,” Kingery said, but ultimately his classification of devices is guided by “policy decisions that are well beyond ... this office.”

When Kingery was asked by a reporter whether the next mass shooter might have a bumpfire device on a semiautomatic rifle in addition to a high-capacity magazine, ATF public affairs officer Marc Willis interrupted.

“You know we can't go down that road,” he said. Public safety is a primary focus of ATF “but we still have to operate within the laws that Congress gives us.”

Kingery pointed out that he has classified several submissions as turning weapons into machine guns, including one that used electronics to take over the firing mechanism.